NUMBER TWENTY-ONE.
An Imperfect Character, such as are for sale to Romance-writers at the Publishing Office of the Gazette.
"In Romance, as in the world, there are no perfectly good characters; but neither, on the other hand, will either readers or his fellow men be pleased with one who is out and out a knave--he must be merely half or three-quarters of one, as it is with everything in the great world, whether honor or vulgarity or truth or falsehood.
"In the publishing office of this paper there is a half-knave who is offered for sale to any romance-writer in Scheerau, for the little which they can afford to pay for him. I a.s.sure Messieurs the writers, that I do not at all exaggerate the imperfections of this knave, for the sake of disposing of him at a higher price; the owner will take the knave back again if he proves not to have malice enough.
"This imperfect character was reared in the states of the Church and born on the borders of Lower Italy; and after his baptism and majority bought himself hatchels and mouse-traps. The fewest possible Germans know that the Italians, with whom this branch of business flourishes, can overreach us immensely. Our character soon raised himself from hatchel-commissioner to hatchel-a.s.socie; he disposed of the mouse-traps, which he ordered from Italy, in Germany, and the mouse-holes were his Ophir and the flax-fields his mint-towns. The hatchels which he sold before the purchase of his patent of n.o.bility, he knocked off at five and a half guilders.
"He must, even before his birth, have, in the other world, dealt in a great house; for he brought with him a ready-made mercantile soul. It was stupid in me not to have mentioned sooner: when, as a boy of nine years old, he had the small-pox, he opened a little shop, and traded in the pock matter, which people took from his dispensary, that is from his body, for purposes of vaccination. He never gave out any matter gratis, but demanded his money for it, and said he was a pock-seedman, only a young beginner. This trade with his own manufacture, nature and the Doctor soon suppressed, and the latter said he was as dear as an apothecary. Hence he even undertook to be one himself.
"And he did become one, only according to the Mecklenburg idiom; for in that every furnishing store is called an apothecary"s shop.[42] That is to say, in Unter-Scheerau he changed his religion and his business and built himself a shop which was to buyers a mere hatchel and mouse-trap.
Here he kept for himself a shop-boy, a man-cook, a friseur, a barber, and a reader of morning papers. All these persons were personated by one, is own, this was and did all, as _ensophos_ [or Jack of all trades.]
"Since with our knave, as an imperfect character, virtues must be mineralized into faults--otherwise I would not offer him to any romance builder--therefore let no one take it ill of me that I also bring forward his white side to set by his black one, as on Bohemian tables they always place side by side white and black dishes.
"In those days he always went forth from his shop on Sunday, though with all permissible parsimony, still well-dressed. His hat, his ring-finger, and his vest, were bordered with genuine gold; his stomach and his calves were enclosed by the work of the silk-worm, and his back was covered by the produce of the English sheep. It is quite in keeping with human malice to call that extravagance which was in this case a rare and covert beneficence; all that the imperfect character had on consisted of p.a.w.ns; for in order to cure people of p.a.w.ning, he threatened every one that he would wear every article on which he lent money, as long as it remained in his hands. In this way he weaned many a one, and the clothes of those with whom humane warnings availed nothing he actually put on after dinner on Sunday. It was therefore less from a want of taste than from an absence of avarice and hardness, that just as he bore in his own person several menial personalities united, so also he wore several dresses, and came forth as variegated as a rainbow, or as a clothes-moth, that eats its way through from cloth to cloth.
"As I am so perfectly sure that he was not spoiled by prodigality, however much he may have the appearance, I will remove all such appearance by the statement that he every Sat.u.r.day bought his pound of flesh for his bachelor"s hall, but--for otherwise it would still prove nothing--did not eat it. He did, indeed, eat one and with the spoon; but it was that of the previous Sat.u.r.day. That is to say, the imperfect character fetched every Sat.u.r.day his holy meat from the stall and enn.o.bled and decorated therewith his Sunday greens. But he appropriated nothing to himself except the vegetable part. On Monday he had the animal portion still and seasoned with it a second dish of greens. On Tuesday the cooked-over flesh worked with new fire at the culture of a fresh cabbage. On Wednesday it had to ogle before him with faint fat-eyes [or spots of grease] floating on another cabbage-soup--and so it went on, till at last the Sunday appeared when the soaked-out rag of flesh came itself to the dinner, but in another sense, and Roper actually ate the pound. So, too, with a pound of Leibnitz"s, Rousseau"s, Jacobi"s,[43] thoughts one may boil vigorously whole ship-kettle-fulls of original leaf-work.
"This parsimony the imperfect character alloyed still more with some degree of deception. He interpolated the articles which he had received in good condition, and wrote back he had received them in a bad condition, they were so and so, and he could only allow for them half price. A third of the price he thus by a clever enough legerdemain whisked out of the buyer"s distant pocket. Wares, casks, bags, which had in his house only a relay-station and were to travel on farther, paid out to him a transit-toll through a little hole he made in them, by way of paying himself therefrom the little which might be charged to the carrier if it was missed. He got up a mint-cabinet or hospital for poor amputated invalid gold pieces. To other depreciated coins he gave back the honorable name which they had lost, and compelled his factors to accept them as legitimated and rehabilitated. No matter in how bad a condition a gold piece might have come into his house, he treated it as an officer and never dismissed it without promotion. Thus do such n.o.bler souls cover even the faults of money with the mantle of Charity.
"In this way his commercial stock and real estate enlarged more and more, and in his heart, brooded over by the friendly warmth of the public, there stirred, like an infusorium in its egg, a faint, featherless, transparent thing, which he called Honor. The imperfect character appropriated to himself, therefore, the character of commercial counsellor.
"And now, when he had caught honor fairly by the wing and fixed it upon paper, he could more readily offend against it than before, when he had it not yet among his papers. He accordingly made his declaration of love to the richest and most avaricious father of a beautiful daughter, whose love for another--an officer--had already led her to take the last step. The daughter hated his declaration of love; but the character with the aid of the father, possessed himself of her struggling hand, drew her by it to the altar, screwed on the ring, and impaled her hand in his. Her second child was his first.[44]
"Meanwhile as his honor, after these bleedings and voidings, could not well be kept on its feet, he had to be thinking about hanging on its neck a good, strengthening amulet, Loyola"s-metallic-plate, a manifesto-of-Luke-and-Agatha--a _diploma of n.o.bility_. His honor was happily restored to health by the Imperial Chancery of Vienna.
"As he had no _community of goods_ with his wife, but only with his creditors, he released himself from the mercantile profession by an innocent failure and found a refuge for himself and his clear conscience and his wife"s goods and his own at his country seat, in order there to serve his G.o.d.
"I mean his G.o.ds;--friends, the imperfect character had none. His ideas of friendship were too n.o.ble and lofty, and demanded the purest and most disinterested love and devotion on a friend"s part; hence he was disgusted with the low blockheads around him, who desired not his heart but his purse, and who pressed him to their bosoms merely that they might squeeze something out of him. He could not so much as bear to have such selfishness in his presence, and his house, therefore, like the human windpipe and Sparta, could not bear to have in it any foreign thing. He believed with Montaigne, that no one could properly love more than one friend, as well as one mistress; hence he bestowed his heart upon a single person, whom of all he prized most highly--namely his own--this he had tried and proved; its disinterested love for him it was that enabled him to attain Cicero"s ideal, who wrote, that one could do for a friend anything, even base things, which one would not do for himself.
"He is the greatest stoic in all the territory of Scheerau; he not merely says that all pleasures are vanity, but he even despises all temporal good, because it cannot make him happy. This contempt of such is not indeed to be supposed inconsistent with the most earnest striving after it, because a philosophor, as the stoics in the note[45]
say, will prefer a life in whose furniture there is so much left as a wire-brush or a stable-broom, to one in which merely this little were wanting, although he is not made any the happier thereby. Hence the imperfect character sets as much store by the least effects (as old Shandy did by the least truths) as by the greatest; accordingly he must make his fire of nut-sh.e.l.ls, seal his letters with wax torn off from old ones, write his own letters on the blank s.p.a.ces in those of his correspondents, etc. The Imperfect Character has herein a resemblance to the miser, who makes a profit out of similar trifles, and whom no reasons can refute; for if I may not throw away a penny, I may not a farthing, half a farthing, 1000th of a farthing; the reasons are the same.
"There is in man a terrible tendency to avarice. The greatest prodigal might be made something still worse, the greatest n.i.g.g.ard, if one should give him so much as to make him account it much and worth increasing; and so _vice versa_. So the dropsical craves more water the more he is swollen with it; as his _water_ ebbs, his thirst ebbs with it.
"The imperfect character thanks heaven for two things: first, that he has fallen into no avarice, secondly, into no extravagance--that he does not deny his wife or his child anything, gives them everything, and only in the case of stupid people, who want to have means of prodigality, takes such means out of their hands, as the old Germans, the Arab and the Otaheitans steal from strangers only, but never from inhabitants--that he is chaste and would sooner untie the money-purse of a merchant than the girdle of Venus--that if he had as many pennies as such or such a one, he would fly to the help of the poor in a very different manner--but nevertheless he no more allows himself to be robbed of his bit than the mourner does of his sorrow, and that at the Last Day the question will be put to him, whether he has gained interest on his pound (sterling).
"This vendible character in the publishing office is, like an English malefactor, stock and seller at once, and will expect nothing of the romance writer for his whole being except a copy gratis of the romance into which he is thrown."
So far Fenk, who could bear all men, but no monster, no skinflint, I have secured this imperfect character for my biography (for he himself exists even biographically under the name of Roper); besides there is a remarkable deficiency here in genuine knaves; nay, if I should compare even Roper with the devils of the Epic Poets and myself with the Poets themselves, neither of us would look very big.
If my readers had a letter of Dr. Fenk"s, excusing his former severity--which reminded us of Scheerau, of the Doctor and of a person very dear to me, and which fits in exactly with the whole narrative--they would insert this letter also in the biography. I have that same letter and the same privilege, and splice it in here:
_Fenk to Me_.
"Accept the poor bearer of this as your client; the Maussenbacher has screwed on to the poor devil his suction-works and quite exhausted him, and now leaves him in the lurch. None of all the knaves and advocates in Scheerau will serve him as patrons against a rich n.o.bleman, for they wish to get the latter one day as their own.
"I am myself, indeed, daily in Maussenbach, and pleading; but the n.i.g.g.ard accepts no disinterested arguments; and for all else Roper has feeling and reason. There will yet come a time when one will find it as hard to comprehend our past stupidity, as we our future wisdom: I mean, when one will be unable to tolerate, not merely, as now, any beggars, but even any millionaires.
"Of the father of a beautiful daughter one constrains himself to think well. I force myself to do so, too: in thy piano-pupil Beata, thou sawest only the green leaves under the bud; now thou mightest see the opening rose-leaves themselves and the fragrant nimbus around them.
Such a daughter of such a father! In other words: the rose blooms upon a black web of root-fibres sucking in nourishment from a filthy soil.
"I am here for the purpose of curing her: the old man will have something for his money; but in Maussenbach no one reflects on a saying of the Abbe Galiani, who was buried four days before I left Italy, that women are perpetual patients. Merely, however, in the nerves: the most sensitive are the most sickly; the most rational or the coldest are the healthiest. If I were a prince, I would make a princely resolution, and in a rescript from my most ill.u.s.trious hand would make it a case of house-arrest, if a woman drank so much as a single spoonful of medicine. You poor misguided creatures, why have you in general so much confidence in us men, and us doctors in particular, as to be pleased that we, tapping the gla.s.ses of physic one after another in the medicine-chest, take you to drive in a medicine-carriage until we transfer you to the carriage that bears you on your last journey?... So have I said to them many a time, and each time they have only taken the more willingly all the medicines I prescribed for them.
"The only kind of medicine that helps women more than it hurts them is certainly dress. According to many naturalists the life of birds is lengthened by moulting, and that of women, too, I add; for they are always ailing until they have on a new plumage. This is not easy to explain on therapeutic principles, but it is true; and the more distinguished one is, consequently the more sickly, the oftener is he obliged to moult, as the swamp-salamander also sheds his skin every five days. A female crab, waiting for a new sh.e.l.l, cuts an awkward figure in her hole. Every poison can become an antidote, and it is certain that clothes can give sicknesses, _e. g_., hectic, plague, etc.; so must they, under the direction of a sensible physician, be able to remove sicknesses. An enlightened Medicus will, in my opinion, if Halle"s domestic dispensary, _i. e_., the wardrobe, fails to give relief, take his recipes from no other dispensary than the Auerbach cellar in Leipsic. As thou canst therewith fly to the help of many a fair invalid, I will furnish thee out of my _materia medica_ the following medicinal neckerchiefs, dresses, etc.
"For steel-medicines: steel-rosettes, and steel-chains.
"The precious stones which were formerly supplied from apothecaries"
shops are even now good to be used outwardly.
"Bouquets, provided they are of silk, are probated medical plants, and by their perfume strengthen the brain.
"Shawls are healing to the breast, and (not a red thread, which is a superst.i.tion, but) a necklace with a medallion is, according to modern physicians, serviceable to diseased necks.
"With Peruvian bark much imposition has been practised, but the genuine is a frock _a la Peruvienne_.
"As, according to the modern surgery, all wounds are healed by mere covering, so, instead of the English taffeta plaster, mere taffeta on the body renders the same service.
"A new visiting-fan is, in violent swoons, indispensable; but whether a m.u.f.f should be cla.s.sed among emollient remedies, false _tours_ among setons, and a parasol among cooling medicines, and dress-tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs under the head of trusses and bandages, this question one or three hundred cases cannot yet settle.
"We prefer to insist upon this, that a frizzling comb is a trepanning-instrument for headache, a repeating-watch for an intermittent fever, and a ball-dress is a panacea.
"And so, therefore, to speak jocosely, the ladies" tailor is an operator; his sew Lug-finger a _digitus medicus_;[46] his finger-hat [as we Germans call the thimble] a doctor"s hat....
"Why did I forget thee, n.o.ble Beata? No _parure_ can cure thee; and if at some future day thy fair heart should grow sick, nothing would heal it but the best heart or death....
"Wonder not at my fire. I have just come from her and forget all faults of hers which a fortnight ago I still knew. Maidens, who are often sick, accustom themselves to wear a look of patient resignation which is _killingly beautiful_.[47] have underscored her favorite expression, but only from her own tongue can it flow in the sweetest dying cadence.
To this patience she is trained not only by her everlasting headaches, but also by her father, who equally torments and loves her, and who, to do her a pleasure, would (according to the egotism of avarice) kill off a world. If the _soul_ of many persons (surely hers also) is too delicate and refined for this marshy earth, so, too, is the _frame_ of many, which can stand nothing harsher than humming-bird weather and vales of Tempe and Zephyrs. A tender body and a tender mind fret each other. Beata, like all of that crystallization, inclines a little to enthusiasm, sensibility, and poetry: but what sets her high up in my eyes is a sense of honor, a modest self-respect, which (according to my small experience) is an inheritance not of education, but of the kindliest destiny. This dignity secures, without prudish anxiety, female virtue. But if one must educate into the soul, nay preach into it, this womanly _point d"honneur_, ah, how easily is such a sermon overcome!
"Women, who respect themselves, are encompa.s.sed with so full a harmony of all their movements, words, looks!... I cannot depict her; but such ones are subjects to be depicted, who resemble the rose, which, down below, where one does not pluck them, has the longest and hardest thorns, but above, where one enjoys them, clothes itself only in a panoply of soft and bending ones.
"I know not whether it is with thee an old story, that daughters tell their mothers every truth and all secrets; to me it is something new, and only one best daughter, Beata, can do it.
"A fortnight ago I recollected a fault of hers not so faintly as to-day, and it is this--that she has too little pleasure in--pleasure, and too much in mournful fancies. There are souls of too great tenderness, that can never be happy (as well as never feel offended) without weeping, and who receive a great piece of good fortune, a great kindness, with a sighing bosom. But when such come into the presence of coa.r.s.e natures, that cannot guess the hidden grat.i.tude and the dumb joy, they are forced to a.s.sume hypocritically not the feeling but the expression of it. Beata"s father demands for every present he makes, whose value he weighs even to an apothecary"s grain, an exultant and exuberant joy; she, on the contrary, at most, does not feel one till some time after; the apparition of one or another light streak of fortune sends a gleam all at once out over the whole line of her sad days, which lie like graves in her memory. In this Beata I also notice, what I have often before, that woman"s body and soul are too tender and excitable, too fine and too fiery for intense intellectual exertion, and that both need, to sustain them, the constant diversion of household labor; the superior women are less injured by diet than by their eccentric sensibilities, which drive their nerves like silver wire through smaller and smaller holes, and thin them out from vermicelli into geometrical lines. A woman, if she had the fiery soul of a Schiller, and should compose therewith one of his pieces, would in the fifth act herself die with the hero.
"I understand thy amorous interrogating articles very well: it is true, the Privy-legation-counsellor von Oefel is a frequent visitor here. He seems, indeed, to have no more tender business here than mercantile, and not to require anything ordered by the commercial agent, except pepper for Ceylon and nutmegs for Sumatra, consequently least of all his daughter and her goods. It is also true that the minister"s lady, that toll-and-alms-box of male hearts, forms one of the party, and has Oefel"s heart already _hooked_ or _eyed_ to her charms; but the devil trust privy-legation-counsellors, especially Oefels. I tell thee, whether he entrap Beata or not, in either case I wonder at it. Thou wilt, of course, console thyself with this, dear Jean Paul, that, in the first place, thou hast greater attractions than he, and secondly, art quite unconscious of having these attractions, which, in conversation, has a great effect. There may well be something in it; for Oefel aims not so much to please, as merely to show that he could please (_if he pleased_), and he therefore allows himself all sorts of whims, merely that one may have something to blame and to forgive and he something to make good; he is also--for a courtier and a diamond must have, beside hardness, pure colorlessness in order to reflect foreign hues and lights more faithfully--he is too vain even for a courtier, and buys with another"s favor only his own. I will console thee with still more "it is true"s" before I bring on my "buts." Beata, it is true, looks as if she were asking herself every minute, why do I not admire him? the minster"s lady looks as if she were asking _her_ every minute, "why dost thou not envy me, when my va.s.sal is like myself a piano-forte with a hundred stops and pedals?"--for he keeps no one position and can venture into any one; every movement seems to flow from the other; his soul changes its positions as playfully as his body, and bends over as gracefully as a fountain in the wind to the remotest matters; nothing confuses him, but he every one; he knows a hundred exordiums to one sermon, begins for the sake of beginning, breaks off for the sake of breaking off, and knows no more than his hearers what he is after--in short, he is a rival, dear Paul!--I can now properly introduce the promised But.
"But although my fair patient overlooks him so coldly, as one who is trying on us a dress, he, however, a.s.sumes the opposite, and throws at her fire-b.a.l.l.s to illuminate himself, and aeolypiles or smoke-b.a.l.l.s for her obscuration, and is already, in advance, cutting mint-stamps for his future medals of victory. Men or manikins like Oefel have such a superfluity of truth, that they are obliged to give it not to one alone, but to distribute it among a thousand women; Oefel would fain command a whole female slave-ship; meanwhile he cares as little about thee as about the minister"s lady, who loves him, because it is her latest lover, and whom he loves, first, because in her triumphal chariot, to which formerly a number of ninnies were harnessed, he would be glad to draw alone as thill-horse; and, secondly, she possesses more art and less feeling than he, and persuades him that it is precisely the reverse.
"That I may now weave our Beata, whom thou wouldst gladly get into thy life and into thy book, into the life and the book of Oefel (he is upon me also), for this reason, dear Paul, I have delivered so many cabinet-sermons to old Roper to the point that the sickliness of his daughter is to be overcome not by one but by several hundred physicians, _i. e_., by society--that the old man will give her a society or rather will give her to one, without himself giving her the necessary alimony. He wants to transplant her into some bed or other of the court-garden: "She, too, shall, with the rest, gain knowledge of the world," he says, and has none himself. He would, if he could, drag and crush down the whole female world from its altars and pedestals and presidential chairs and regular seats to milking-stools and work-benches and foot-stools; nevertheless his own daughter shall have Jews and diamond-dust grind facettes and angles of radiance upon her, which he himself hates. Once at court, the legation-counsellor will see her every day--and Jean Paul is _nowhere_.
"This Jean Paul asked me in a sly way, whether he might not act as lawyer to the father of the aforesaid daughter, because he, said Jean, had heard of the resignation of the present one. Herr Kolb, however (the lawyer in question), is still there, and still quarrelling; says every week: "If every one knew the tricks of Roper"s that I know;"
while Roper says every week: "If every one knew the tricks of Kolb"s that I know;" and so the two are glued together by mutual apprehensions. Besides, just now, the thing is not to be thought of; for in fourteen days old Roper receives the oath of allegiance from his manor. A miser dreads to change or to risk anything.
"Why dost thou let thy good sister stay so long in the a.r.s.enical fumes of the court? Is what she can gain there worth as much as what she brings with her and may lose there, her pure, tender, though volatile heart? On my tours I thought otherwise, but now in solitude, a coquettish insect, a coquet-crab, creeping now forward and now backward, that keeps opening her great and little shears and always reproduces them as fast as one tear"s them off, who instead of a heart carries in her breast a stomach, and yet, like all insects, is cold-blooded, such an incrusted female crab is more revolting to me than a sh.e.l.less one in the moulting period of sensibility, which is too soft, and out of which romance-writers make the delicate crab-b.u.t.ter.